The Iowa Caucus Results, Twelve Hours Early

On New Year's Eve in Des Moines, the hundreds of political junkies here for the caucuses anxiously checked their iPhones and Blackberries. We weren't counting down the hours 'til midnight, or getting in touch with loved ones back home. We were waiting for the Des Moines Register to post its final caucus poll. Considered the gold standard of Iowa polling, the DMR survey--which showed a top tier of Romney, Paul, and Santorum; and a bottom tier of Gingrich, Perry, and Bachmann--would help us set the storylines that we'll be bringing you later tonight. Yes, the caucus results are still up in the air--maybe more so this year than in recent memory, with 41 percent of those surveyed by the DMR saying they might still change their minds. But who needs official results to craft narratives for the six candidates competing here? Isn't that what we're all here for--to decide what happened before it actually happens? Later tonight, you'll get a collective spasm of analysis, and some of it might even be accurate! But none of it will be spontaneous. No matter what happens here in Iowa tonight--barring the divine intervention that Bachmann believes will bring her a victory--the many potential narratives have already been written. That's because we've been writing them in our heads for days. Read on, so that everything you hear later on tonight will sound eerily familiar.

Mitt Romney: We* have already decided that there's pretty much no scenario by which Romney doesn't come out of Iowa in excellent shape (and there's pretty much no scenario by which he doesn't eventually win the nomination). After hemming and hawing for months about whether he'd even compete here, Romney finally went all in, shrink-wrapping the requisite bus in a Romney for President sign and crisscrossing the state over the last couple weeks--and now he's all but assured a top three finish. If he finishes first, he "rolls into New Hampshire like Caesar," as his former strategist Mike Murphy tweeted. And if Romney slips to second? Or even third? Nothing to fear, since the guys who'll beat him don't pose any long-term threat: One is a crank who can't possibly win the nomination; the other simply doesn't have the campaign apparatus to compete over the long haul. As Politico's Roger Simon tweeted moments after the DMR poll came out on New Year's Eve: "It's over. Let's all head for Tampa."

Rick Santorum: But, of course, it can't really be over--not yet anyway. Tampa isn't for another eight months, which is why Santorum is about to enjoy a media tongue-bath as the new new thing, otherwise known as the conservative alternative to Romney. Already, the poll savvy among us are predicting that, despite his third place standing in the final DMR tally, Santorum might actually win Iowa, since the candidates who showed significant movement in past final DSM polls, like Steve Forbes and Mike Huckabee, outperformed those polls in the actual caucuses. But even if he finishes second or third, we've decided that Santorum will be the story out of Iowa. Sure, his strong showing in Iowa is the result of his rabid social conservative views, not to mention the fact that he's basically been living here for the past six months and has done 350 town halls. But we'll talk about the boost he'll get from his Iowa performance; and how the first actual vote will force conservatives to finally rise up against moderate Mitt; and how Santorum's proto-populist economic message (His grandfather was a coal miner! He talks about manufacturing jobs!) will resonate with the 99 percent and serve as a perfect foil to one percent Mitt. Someone needs to keep us from having to write about the Romney victory stroll we all know this race has become. (Any resemblance this storyline might bear to recent pasts of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and this next guy are to be ignored full stop.)

Ron Paul: Frankly, we're a little tired of Paul. A week ago, he was all the rage here. He was rising in the polls. His young supporters were flooding the state--their beards shaved and their tats covered as they went door-to-door spreading the Paul gospel. It was a Ron Paul Revolution! But then those old racist newsletters were back in the news, and we actually had to cover the guy's longwinded lectures on Austrian economics, and we started getting weird questions from his conspiracy-theorizing supporters about whether we worked for the Council on Foreign Relations. Ron Paul was becoming a drag. And, if you believe the DMR poll, the last two days of which showed Paul dropping to third behind Santorum and Romney, actual Iowa Republican voters agreed. Yes, the more enterprising among us--eager to create a little more suspense in this thing--will strive to craft a will-he-or-won't-he storyline about Paul bolting the GOP for a third-party run. Or we'll delve into the details of Paul's campaign organization in other states and how he's formulating a complex plan for a long, drawn-out delegate fight with Romney. And there's surely a larger truth to be mined about how much of the GOP has come to embrace Paul's views on fiscal policy, which, just four years ago, were decidedly fringe. But the fringe is really where Paul belongs--and, soon enough, that's where he'll once again be.

Newt Gingrich: There was a little while there where Newt really started to worry us. He was cutting sappy TV ads about Christmas. He was getting weepy about his mother. He was so damn saccharine and positive that it looked like he wasn't running for president so much as auditioning for a spot on Oprah's network. What happened to the "it's clear that I'm going to be the nominee" guy, the politician who once advised his allies to demonize their opponents as "debased"? Who was this new, kinder, gentler Newt? But then, in the final few days before the caucus, the old feisty Newt was back--and his feistiness, bless his heart, was directed at the frontrunner. One minute he was bitching about having been "Romney-boated"; the next he was accusing Mitt of trying to "buy the election." Of course, we all know that Newt's return to form came too late in the game for him to improve his showing in Iowa. But we have high hopes for New Hampshire--and especially South Carolina--where we eagerly await the old Newt to take a hammer to Romney, who has miraculously escaped any sustained pounding so far. That's what we'll be looking for from Newt. We've long since come down from those trippy days a few weeks ago, when we all tried to get our heads around the idea that Newt might actually win this thing. We know he can't and have stopped even pretending that he can. But he doesn't have to win, or even be competitive, to prolong this drama. Newt's job will be to serve as the designated attack dog and at least provide some colorful quotes. We're hoping that this time Newt doesn't disappoint.

Rick Perry: If there was a mercy rule in politics, we'd invoke it for Perry. Covering him on the stump has become a painful experience. Gone is the strutting, puffed-up, coyote-shooting Perry of last August. In his place, there's a cautious, timid man who has the middling political skills of a county commissioner. "He just looks like he's spooked and has absolutely no confidence," says one journalist who's had to follow Perry as he's dead-man-walked around the state this past week. Unfortunately for Perry, he's got enough money ("Texans are very generous," explains one wag) to soldier on for a few more weeks and make a last stand in South Carolina. And that will give us the opportunity to write process stories like the one Politico has already done, loaded with blind quotes from various Perry advisors trashing one another for running such a crappy campaign operation. Every political contest needs a train wreck for us to gawk at. That's what Perry will continue to provide.

Michele Bachmann: Bachmann doesn't even provide that anymore. We no longer roll our eyes or try to stifle a giggle at her Baghdad-Bob-like pronouncements that she's going to win Iowa and then go on to New Hampshire and South Carolina. Traditionally, only three tickets get punched out of Iowa. But this time around, thanks to Perry's money and Newt's hubris, it looks like five candidates will make it out of here. That leaves one surefire Iowa loser, and that will be Bachmann. And if Bachmann does somehow manage to make it to New Hampshire and South Carolina, the biggest question we will be confronted with is: do we bother to cover her? Yes, we're all desperate to pretend that this thing isn't already wrapped up. But some fictions are just too implausible--even for us.

* If this isn't already clear, by "we," we mean "the royal we," by which we mean the campaign media horde.

Jason Zengerle is a GQ contributing writer. Follow him on Twitter,@zengerle.